The second name on Jasons deed was Harlan Voss.
Commissioner Voss. The vice chairman of the county board. The man sitting two seats from the chairman, who had been nodding along all evening while Jasons lawyer talked about clear title.
The solicitor read it twice, flat, the way a man reads something he has found in a drawer. Jason Brubaker and Harlan Voss, as joint tenants, recorded May 11th.
The chairman turned his head very slowly. Commissioner Voss was already reaching for his water glass. He said he had meant to disclose the interest. He said it was a small investment. He said he had not planned to vote on the permit.
The solicitor said, Commissioner, you were about to.
It is a short sentence, but the room heard it. Pennsylvania has a Public Official and Employee Ethics Act, and the first thing it says is that a public official may not vote on a matter in which he has a financial interest. A man who owns a share of the land under six proposed houses should not be sitting on the board that approves them.
The commissioner stood up. He said he would recuse himself from this matter and any related ones. The chairman said that was not quite enough, and asked the solicitor to prepare a referral to the State Ethics Commission, and the solicitor said it was already on his desk.
Upton had buried his father in 1983 and left his barn standing, and sixty-two years of photographs in an old seed box turned out to be a better survey than anything with an orange flag.
The permit was denied the following month. The county does not approve subdivisions on land the applicant cannot prove he owns, and Jason could not. His own surveyor had overlooked the aerial survey. A Pennsylvania judge heard my petition to quiet title in September and read the photographs from 1961 forward, and he ruled from the bench that the strip was mine by adverse possession, a clear title that went back sixty-two years. The deed to my neighbor was corrected.
The Ethics Commission fined Commissioner Voss and required him to divest. He did not seek reelection.
The barn was a different matter. Jason was ordered to pay the value of the heifer barn and the cost of treating the cut heifer, which came to a little over forty thousand dollars. He paid it. He did not come to the farm to say anything, and I did not expect him to.
I did not have the money to rebuild. The cost of timber alone made me sick. But this is Lancaster County, and the word got around. On the first Saturday of October, forty men and women came up the lane in buggies and pickups. They were Amish and Mennonite and Methodist and a retired schoolteacher who had never held a hammer. They had brought sawhorses and levels and a table of pies, and the frame went up before noon.
By supper there was a roof on it. A young man I had never met was nailing the last row of tin and he called down to ask where I wanted the door. I said, Facing the house. He said, I figured.
Mark was there. He had taken the day off. He did not say much, but he carried boards for ten hours, and when it was over he came and stood next to me at the fence. He said, Mom, I told you we could not fight them. I said I know. He said, I was wrong. I said, You were scared, and so was I.
The heifers moved in on Sunday. The one with the scarred shoulder walked in first.